Amazing Baby

read Steve’s interview with Will and Simon from this up and coming new band—

When I was given a review copy of ‘Rewild’, the debut album from New York indie rockers Amazing Baby back in June, I was more than pleasantly surprised when I put it on.  Every now and again I have the good fortune of hitting upon a good thing before anyone else, and such was the case.

Amazing Baby’s ‘Rewild’ has been on heavy rotation on my MP3 player ever since, and when I learned that the band was going to be part of the lineup at Osheaga 2009, I knew I had to have the interview.  And so after harassing my editor about it for weeks at a time, I was got the interview.

I sat down with Will Roan and Simon O’Connor almost right after their set at one of the smaller stages at the venue, so I was treated to seeing them live (their first live show in Montreal, as well) as well as getting a chance to talk to them and find out more about their unique sound and style.  I also got the chance to unwittingly play tour guide, and explain a little about some unique Canadian cultural icons.

CONFRONT: So basically, I don’t know if it was your label or your promoter here that sent me your CD but I got it about a month before the album dropped and I listened did a review of it, so when I found out you were playing Osheaga, I said “Shit, yeah!  I’d like the interview.”

WILL: Is that how it’s pronounced?  “Osheaga”?

CONFRONT: Well, that’s how I pronounce it.

WILL: What is it in reference to again?

CONFRONT: Somebody told me, too, but I don’t remember.  I’m going to have to Wikipedia it.  It’s probably on their main website.

(From the website: http://www.osheaga.com/2009/en/faq “Osheaga was a name used for the area that is now Montreal by some of the first European settlers in the region…Mohawk oral history goes the white man was waving with his hands, either offering to shake hands or asking about rapids on the river. The astonished Mohawks looked at each other and said “O she ha ga” which meant people of shaking hands. From the meeting Cartier transcribed the word Osheaga as meaning large rapids while the Mohawks would use the oral phrase to describe where they met the people of the shaking hands.”)

WILL: Is this really an island, by the way?

CONFRONT: Yeah.  It’s basically a sub-island of Montreal.  Basically back when we had the World’s Fair in 1967 they were building the subway line that basically turned Montreal from butt-fuck nowhere into an actual metropolitan center

SIMON: Yeah,

CONFRONT: And so they were just basically dumping the earth from that.  And they needed somewhere to build Expo ’67, and so somebody said “Hey, there’s St Helen’s Island in the middle of the river, all the earth we’re moving to build the subway, why don’t we just dump it there and build up the island, build the park and put it there?  So this is all several hundred million tonnes of earth and rock

SIMON: Oh, my god!  You’re the bomb!  Thank you so much for that info!  I can’t believe you!

CONFRONT: Well, thanks!  No problem.  It was just basically built because they needed a venue for the world’s fair.  That’s how all this got here, then the amusement park got here.  And The geodesic dome you see right there was built by Buckminster Fuller.

SIMON: What is the purpose of that, besides awe?

CONFRONT:  Well, it was built for the World’s Fair.

WILL: You know Shea Stadium in Queens?  It’s pretty much for the same thing.

SIMON: Same as with the Eiffel Tower.  The Eiffel Tower is pretty useless.

CONFRONT:  Well, the Eiffel Tower was built by a psychotic midget.  Or are you allowed to say “midget”?

WILL: Toulouse-Lautrec?

CONFRONT: Yeah; Toulouse-Lautrec, the Engineer who designed the Tower was rumoured to be completely crazy.  And basically, if you’ve seen “Moulin Rouge” Jon Leguinzamo’s character is essentially that.

SIMON: I can’t make it through more than ten minutes of that movie.  I actually tried to sit through it in the theatre.

WILL: I had a girlfriend that brought me, and she was like “You’re goanna love it,”

SIMON: Yeah,

CONFRONT: Married; I had to go.

SIMON: I got dragged to it and I left after ten minutes and then I was like, “Oh, I’ll give it another try,” on the airplane.  No other movie’s playing; that’s it.

CONFRONT: You’re kind of hostage to the movie at that point.

SIMON: And I couldn’t make it through ten minutes.  I chose to look out the window.

CONFRONT: So tell me about how you guys got together, how the band formed, and where you came up with your sound, because you’re like nothing else I’ve heard these days.

SIMON: Thank you

WILL: Thanks.  We were friends for a while before we started playing music together.  We were in two bands that shared members and we shared a practice space and we would, like, go out and party and hang out in the same circles.  We never really got it together and both of our bands weren’t really…it had been a couple of years and nothing really happened and people were getting frustrated, so we just decided to meet up after work and just try something new out, because I had not worked with anybody other than the people in my band for a very long time.

SIMON: It was totally one of the lowest points of my life, actually.  I’d been in bands since I was 14 years old, pretty well non-stop.  And, like, when it ended I felt, “The fucking world is over.  I can’t do music”…and we were basically “Let’s make music together” and I loved the way he sang, and so we decided to do kind of a two-person thing.  That’s how it started.  We weren’t playing for nobody; we weren’t trying to make it.  We weren’t even trying to get shows, really.  Our first goal was to make a record for us.

WILL: Yeah.  And the way our previous bands developed it was live in the practice space, and a lot of the musical arrangements of our stuff was very life-oriented music.  And near the end of our careers we started getting into recording and we started getting into different tricks and different effects.  And by the end of that, we were really focused on the recording process rather than the live process.  So when we started—kind of haphazardly—recording our own music and home demoing and we were like, “Throw a delay on it” or “Let’s throw a reverse symbol on it here” or “Let’s just try weird stuff!” you know?  And it was kind of, like, “Let’s try to beef up a dinky keyboard and drum machine stuff” and we did it at home.  And I think that has developed into a larger scope, into the rest of our album.  The first song we ever really demoed was “Invisible Palace” and that’s our “classic”.  Two of the things we use a lot on the record are bendy keyboard strings and vocals.  And we seriously went for a real…kind of crazy ideas, with good song writing is how it started.

SIMON: And one of our previous tracks was really fast, frantic.  I would say kind of technical and we just decided to slow it down and chew it up.  We sort of accidentally decided to put up our stuff on MySpace.  We were drunk at a party, and we were being assholes and said “Yeah, that’d be fun, let’s do this.” And we had to bring our iPod around.  And I guess somehow the word just went around, probably because we had sort of accomplished something with our previous projects; I think the right people knew and we had been ALMOST there but not quite, but I think the right people heard it somehow by word of mouth.  It basically became clear that this was serious, so we got the rest of the dudes and made the record.